“A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.”

When you’re making a critical decision, you have to understand how it’s going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you’re talking to, but the people that aren’t in the room. Everybody else.

These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?

Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.

You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.

There are no silver bullets.

There are no silver bullets.

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

I believe in strength over lack of weakness.

Here’s where we are and here’s what I didn’t recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is.

The one thing with stress is, you’ve got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.

There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.

When I was CEO, and I’d listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.

I always had this thing, when I was younger especially, I didn’t want to do movies that much.

My sins seemed very great to me but when I compared them to Your forgiveness I found Your forgiveness to be greater

National Action Network, the group I founded, has affiliates or chapters in over 40 cities around the country.

I found out how temperamental I am, yes. And that sometimes that can be kind of off-putting.

I found they took a lot out of you and they were exhausting for me in a lot of ways.

I have found people on both sides of the aisle, white and black, that’ll give you the shirt off their back.

And I’ve also found people that won’t give you a piece of bread if you’re starving to death.

Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research.